Trump Speaks After Winning 2024 Iowa Caucuses Transcript

"And when he says endorse, we're really talking about 2015. He endorsed me before, actually long before I knew I was going to run. I said, "Who's this man in Iowa? He's a senator, a state senator. He is a good-looking guy too, doesn't he look…" You could pay him and give him a lot of money. And by the way, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for being here. You are so great. Comes all the way from Missouri, which isn't that far. You can't drive an electric car that far though. Thank you very much. I appreciate it very much.

The group of people that we have on the stage is just emblematic of the tremendous group that we've had. We've had such a great team. We did well, we were looking really good in 2016. And just to go back to the senator, he was saying, I said, "Who is that guy? Brad, his name. Who is he? He keeps endorsing me. He keeps saying Trump, and I didn't even know I was running." He endorsed me four months before I knew I was running about four months before the Escalade ride down with our great first lady, and that was Brad. I said, "Who is he?" So he was the first one.

But we have people that are so incredible. You're Republican Party Chairman Bobby Kaufmann and his son, who is a brilliant guy and he worked with us. And I will tell you that is a family of real professionals. Matt Whitaker, who is the very talented and very good attorney general. Where is Matt? He's around here someplace and he's been with us all the way. We have a man that was very impressive and I say there's nothing wrong with it. He's so solid and so good that he didn't catch on. Sometimes being a little controversial is good. He's so perfect.

Although he did break his leg during the campaign, that wasn't so good. But it sort of stood out a little bit, Doug. But Doug Burgum from North Dakota, the governor and his beautiful wife Kathryn. And he got out of the race. What people don't know is that he actually supported me on the other side twice already, right? Then he decided to do it and he was outstanding. But the traction is never easy, right? You need controversy for traction sometimes. And this guy is the most solid guy. There's no controversy whatsoever.

And he is one of the best governors in our country, and I hope that I'm going to be able to call on him to be a piece of the administration, a very important piece of the administration. And also just to conclude with this, the entire Trump team, and that includes my two boys who are really here all the time whenever we needed them. Whenever we needed them. They are great, Eric and Don. And look at all these people. Susie, I have to say. And Chris. Chris. And they want no accolades. They just want a victory and they want to make America great again.

That's all they want actually. They don't want to be speaking. They don't want to have pictures. They just want to do their job, right? I want to thank you very much, Jason, everybody. You're really fantastic. What a job you've done. Thank you. So we're going to come together. We are going to drill baby, drill, right away, drill baby, drill. We're going to seal up the border because right now we have an invasion. We have an invasion of millions and millions of people that are coming into our country.

I can't imagine why they think that's a good thing. It's a very bad thing. I think it's a group of people that probably larger in number than New York state. And we can't have that. We can't have that. It's not sustainable as a country. It's horrible. And they're coming from prisons and jails. They're coming from all over. They're coming from countries that most people have never heard of. And they're coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. They're being emptied out into our country. And they're terrorists.

Many terrorists are coming in. In 2019, I saw just recently on a poll, they had none in 2019, no terrorists. Now I even say there's got to be some, but they have none. And then as soon as this group took over, they have hundreds and hundreds of terrorists coming in, known terrorists, some of them really bad. And many of them are in, and they came in and nobody knows where they are. This is not a good thing and we're going to have to deport. We're going to have to have a deportation level that we haven't seen in this country for a long time since Dwight Eisenhower actually.

So I don't want to be overly rough on the president, but I have to say that he is the worst president that we've had in the history of our country. He's destroying our country. And my wife attended the funeral two months ago of Rosalynn Carter and it was beautiful. And Jimmy Carter was there. And I thought to myself, "Jimmy Carter is happy now because he will go down as being a brilliant president by comparison to Joe Biden. He'll be a brilliant president. He's going to be known as brilliant by comparison." So we have to stop the invasion.

We have to bring down our energy. I say all the time, we have more liquid gold under our feet than any other nation anywhere in the world. And we have to stop the crime and we have to help rebuild our cities and we have to rebuild the capitol, Washington DC. I was there when one of the Biden indictment trials. This is the only person, this never happened before, but I go to a lot of courthouses because of Biden, because they're using that for election interference. And it's on things like election. And I don't know if you know, but they did polls tonight on the election of 2020.

Do you believe it was honest or not? 82% said it was not. And we can't have that, Chairman. We can't have that. You can't have a situation like that. So we're going to straighten out our elections. We're going to do a lot of great things. We're going to try and go to paper ballots as soon as possible. Voter ID, one day elections. We have these elections that last for 62 days. And if you need some more time, take as much time as you want. And so many bad things happen.

We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections. Actually, Jimmy Carter's commission said that a long time ago. We're going to rescue our economy. We're going to save our economy. We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. There was never a greater economy, and now we don't. And when you look at what's happened with inflation, inflation is destroying… They call it a country killer going back hundreds of years. Germany… Countries that had big inflation are dead.

They become dead countries. We have to stop that immediately and we want peace through strength. Russia would've never attacked Ukraine, would've never done it. Putin and I get along fine. We get along very well. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. The fake news, which I would… If the fake news would become real and honest news, 90% of our problems in this country would be solved. They would be solved. So Russia would've never attacked. Israel would've never been attacked. The Ukraine situation is so horrible.

The Israeli situation is so horrible. What's happened? And we're going to get them solved. We're going to get them solved very fast. I actually said, "Ukraine, I know President Putin very well. I know Zelenskyy very well. I'm going to get him and we're going to get it solved very quickly." Should have never happened, would've never happened. Now you have all that death, far greater than people understand. The numbers are far, far greater than anybody would even think possible. You're going to find that out in the years to come.

When they knocked down these massive buildings in Ukraine and then you see they announced two people were slightly wounded. No, no many people were killed. Many people were killed. We're going to get it stopped. But it's so sad because it should have never started, people killed and a culture destroyed. You can never replace thousand year old buildings with the most beautiful golden domes and churches and everything, just all rubble now. And it's so sad, would've never, ever happened.

And likewise, Israel would've never been attacked. It all comes from Iran. And we would've had a deal with Iran very quickly, had the election where we, by the way, got… And I say we because it's all we. We got more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country. But they say we lost by a whisker. But regardless of that, we're going to do incredible things and we're not going to let China do what they'd like to do. I get along great with him also, President Xi. He's a very strong leader, and we're going to get things solved.

We're going to get the Ukraine war solved. We're going to get the Israeli situation solved. But if you think back to that, Iran was broke. I said to every country, anybody does business with Iran, buys oil from Iran. They were broke. We're not going to let you do business in the United States. And that's the way it is. They did very little business, almost sold no oil. Nobody wanted to do that. That's a big penalty. And what happened is they had no money to give to Hamas and to give to Hezbollah. And in fact, there were a lot of stories at the time.

They had no money for terror. And for four years, we had no terror. We had the terror ban, we had the terror ban. They called it the Trump travel ban. But it was really the Trump terror ban. We don't want people in our country that are going to blow up our shopping centers. Thank you very much. And we want a country of law and order. So we're going to rebuild the capital of our country, Washington DC. We're going to scrub those beautiful marble columns and get the stickers off them. And we're going to scrub them and get the graffiti off them.

And we're going to clean the streets and we're going to rebuild the streets. And we're not going to have rusted medians through the middle that are falling down into the roads where foreign dignitaries from all over the world come and they look. And we're not going to be riding on top of garbage like I did just a month ago, riding on top of garbage. We're going to rebuild our beautiful Washington DC and we're going to take control of it. And we're going to make unbelievably harsh penalties for people that go around shooting.

Last week they shot three people. And every night something happens. It's so sad. And likewise, we're going to rebuild our cities and we'll work with the Democrats to do it. I'd be glad to work with the people in New York. We're going to work with the people in Chicago and LA. We're going to rebuild our cities and we're going to make them safe. And we're going to give our police officers immunity. So every time they do something, they don't get sued and stopped. We're going to end crime in our cities.

In Iowa, you don't know what that means, but I'll tell you, this is a different place. You don't know about crime. You don't know about getting mugged and getting whacked and getting thrown into subways. And we're going to stop it, and we're going to come down very hard on criminals and we're going to stop crime in America. So I want to just finish by saying that this has been an incredible experience. The people have been… This is the third time we've won, but this is the biggest one.

They said, "Well, if you win by 12%, that's a big win. That's going to be very hard to do." Well, I think we've more than doubled that, I guess, tripled it maybe. They said you'll never get over 50. And I just left and we were at 54. Now, I don't know what's going to happen with it, but they said, "You can't do that, sir." I said, "What's about the highest?" "Well, you could get into the forties, maybe 40, 41." And then I look up and it was very interesting. I didn't know they called it early. I thought that they called it at about 10 o'clock. My impression. See, this gentleman, we built…

He's dressed like a wall. I love this guy. He's been at 150 rallies probably, right? He has the most beautiful outfit I've ever seen. It's all beautiful brick. Will you come up here? Just come up here. Come on. It's so nice to see, right? Come on up here. He's emblematic of what we did. We built over 500 miles of wall. We were going to add another 200 miles. It's much more than we promised. And we had the safest border in the history of our country. Now we have the worst border in the history of the world. Look at this, man.

Really nice, nice to see you, man. You take care of yourself.

Thank you. I love that outfit. I love him. That's great. We love it. That's a hot selling jacket, by the way. But that represents what we did. No, we built a tremendous… That's the reason. And we got Mexico to give us 28,000 soldiers free. And we had remained in Mexico and we had catch and release in Mexico, and we did a job. We had the safest border in our history. We had the greatest economy in our history. We were a great nation three years ago. And now we're a nation in decline. We are going to turn it around so fast. It's going to happen so fast.

We're going to drill. We're going to make great. We have great wealth. We're going to drill. We're going to use that money to lower your taxes even further. We gave you the biggest tax cut in history, and we're going to lower them further. And we're also going to pay off national debt. It's about time. It's about time. So it's now off to New Hampshire, a great place. We won it last time and we won it both times and we love it. The people are great. But the truth is, the people in our country are great.

They're all great. We love Iowa, but they're all great. They only want to see one thing. They want our country to come back. They're embarrassed by what's going on. Our country is laughed at all over the world. They're laughing at us, and they want our country to come back. They want America. They want us to be great again. It's a very simple MAGA, Make America Great Again. And America first. America first is a very important part of MAGA.

So we're going to put America first. We're going to make America great again. Again, Iowa, we love you. You are going to… You just go out and buy larger tractors and more land. Don't worry about it. And to all of the people standing behind me and all of the people in this room, and so many great politicians and great dignitaries and friends, I just want to thank you all. This is a very special night. And this is the first, because the big night is going to be in November when we take back our country.

And truly, we do make our country great again. Thank you very much everybody. Great honor. Thank you very much. Thank you."

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